Page 137 of Smoke and Glitter

That matters more than I expected.

The last time we sat across from each other, I had watched him reach the edge of the sentence he couldn't say and wanted so badly to put words in his mouth that I had to keep reminding myself not to. He'd spent months letting me do exactly that in smaller ways. Filling silence. Interpreting him generously. Deciding what he probably meant.

Not today. So I wait.

Sam starts once, stops and scrubs a hand over his beard. When he tries again, he gets as far as, "What we had worked for me," before my stomach turns over.

His head comes up.

"No. Fuck. That's not what I mean."

"Promising."

"I warned you."

"You did."

He shifts on the bench, visibly irritated with himself now. "I liked what it let me get away with."

That is different. I say nothing.

Sam looks straight ahead while he works his way through it. "I got almost everything I wanted. You upstairs. Your shoes under my bed. Your coffee order in my head. You wandering into the kitchen half asleep wearing one of my shirts. I got to know when work was pissing you off and when you were pretending something didn't bother you because you didn't want to deal with it yet."

His fingers lock together.

"And I didn't have to tell you what any of that did to me."

I turn a little more toward him. He keeps going without waiting for the question.

"You were there. You wanted me. You kept coming back. As long as I never said how much I wanted the same thing, I could tell myself I hadn't really put anything in your hands."

"What would I have had in my hands?"

His jaw shifts.

"Me."

The word is so simple I think I've misunderstood it.

Sam finally looks at me. "If I told you how much I wanted you, how much I wanted what we were becoming, then you could leave knowing exactly what it would do to me."

My throat tightens.

"I wasn't planning to leave."

"I understand that."

"Do you?"

"Yes." His answer comes without hesitation. "That's part of why what I did was so fucked up."

The wind pushes a strand of hair across my mouth. I pull it away and wait.

Sam looks down again. "I told you in Chicago that what happened with Elise didn't create all of this. That's still true. I was doing versions of it long before her. Taking care of things myself. Being useful. Making sure nobody had to do much for me."

His thumb works against the side of his hand.

"Then my wife and my business partner handed me a pretty convincing argument for never questioning any of it again."